The anthracite collieries of Pennsylvania could now produce 50,000,000 tons a year. The railroads restrict them to 40,000,000 or 41,000,000 tons,[12] nine or ten million tons less than they could furnish to ward off the frosts of winter and to speed the wheels of the world, and this creation of artificial winter has been in progress from the beginning of the combination. In the ten months between February and November, 1892, the price of coal in the East, as investigated by Congress in 1893,[13] was advanced by the coal railroads as much as $1.25 and $1.35 a ton on the kinds used by house-keepers, and the combinations, the report of Congress says, "exercise even a more baleful influence on the production and transportation of coal for the Western market." The extortion in the price fixed by the coal railroads was found by Congress, in 1888, to be an average of one dollar a ton--"considerably more than a dollar a ton"--on all consumed in the United States, or $39,000,000 in that year, and now $40,000,000 to $41,000,000 a year. The same investigation found that between 1873 and 1886 $200,000,000 more than a fair market price was taken from the public by this combination.[14] This in anthracite alone. How many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of millions more have been taken by the railroads which control the bituminous coal-fields from Pennsylvania to the Pacific, there are no adjudicated means of estimating. By the same power which has crushed out the independent coal-miner, the retailer in the cities has been reduced from a free man to an instrument to despoil his neighbors--with whom he is often a fellow-victim--for the benefit of absentee capitalists; he is hounded by detectives; by threats of cutting off his supply, is made a compulsory member of a secret oath-bound society to "maintain prices." "Combinations exist," says the Canadian report, "among coal-dealers in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and London. Detectives are employed and the dealers placed under surveillance.... Oaths of fidelity to the constitution and rules are required not only of the members, but also of their salesmen, and the oaths in the cases of these employés are made in some instances retroactive as well as prospective. All violations of oaths are adjudicated upon by the executive committee referred to, the penalties being heavy fines or expulsion.... In accordance with arrangements made with the American coal-dealers, those who were in default in membership, either from inability to pay fines or from other causes, were prevented from purchasing coal in the United States."[15] The retailer dare not tell his wrongs even in the committee-rooms of Congress. "Your committee," says the report of 1893 to Congress, "experienced great difficulty in obtaining testimony from retail coal-dealers, who apparently labor under fears of injury to their business in case they should appear and give evidence."